Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

March 1937. "Unemployed family from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, camped on a river bottom near Holtville, California." View full size. Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration.

Summer 1942. "Good citizenship and plain common sense. This man is performing a duty every car owner owes to himself and to our fighting men. In having his car adjusted to prevent excessive tire wear -- and in observing the simple rules that make tires last longer -- he is making a valuable contribution to our war effort. The man who wastes rubber is a poor citizen and blind even to his own personal interests." View full size. From photos by Martha McMillan Roberts, Howard Hollem, Albert Freeman and Howard Liberman for the Office of War Information.

November 1911. Chicopee, Massachusetts. Tony Soccha [Scocca?], 65 Exchange Place. Bobbin boy in #7 Room at Dwight Manufacturing; been working there for a year. View full size. Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.

1942. Chrysler Corporation plant at Highland Park, Detroit. "Applying automobile production methods to machining of 40 mm. anti-aircraft gun barrels in a former automobile plant. Five cutting instruments work at the same time. Under the old single-operation methods of gunmaking, only one of these could work at one time. Automobile workers are proud of the improvement." Medium format safety negative by Alfred Palmer for the Office of War Information. View full size.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.